


eyes i dare not meet in dreams

by earnshaws



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: Gen, Literary References & Allusions, Modernism, POV First Person, PTSD, World War I, a little bit of a magnus archives crossover but only in the sense of a frame device, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 18:30:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17751206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earnshaws/pseuds/earnshaws
Summary: Statement of Randolph Carter, about his experiences in World War I. Statement taken direct from subject, December 21, 1963.





	eyes i dare not meet in dreams

  _Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,_  
 _A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,_  
 _I had not thought death had undone so many._  
 _Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,_  
 _And each man fixed his eyes before his feet._  
 _Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,_  
 _To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours_  
 _With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine._  
 _There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!_  
 _“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!_  
 _“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,_  
 _“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?_  
 _“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?_  

— T.S. Eliot, _The Waste Land_ (I. The Burial of the Dead)

 

* * *

 

Good afternoon. Thank you for the coffee. I know you must be busy, so I’ll do my best to make this quick. Feel free to stop me if anything I say is unclear or requires further explanation, but be warned that I do have a tendency to ramble. Old habits die hard, it seems.

I enlisted in the war on the day I turned forty. Before you ask— yes, the identification I provided you with states my age as twenty-seven, and yes, that is accurate. I can see you’re thinking that one of the things I have just told you must be false, but I assure you that they are both quite true. It’s a longer and stranger story than you probably have time for, so I do hope that for the moment you will take my word for it. And the word of the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles, I suppose.

Anyway. I joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914, well before America became involved in the war. My friends looked at me askance, when I told them, and I can see why. I don’t exactly look— or act, for that matter— the part of a soldier. _[Laughs.]_ But I had just lost a very dear friend of mine to a terrible accident for which I was partially to blame, and I was consequently in a rather volatile emotional state, so on the kind of wild whim that drives braver men to braver acts I went to the recruitment station in Back Bay and signed the requisite papers. It was barely a week before I shipped off to Europe.

I remained in France for two years. I will not bore you with a laundry list of the battles in which I participated, or the campaigns on which I marched. Those events have all been recorded many times over, and I do not particularly care to relive them. I will say, however, that I first saw combat in the early summer of 1915, at what I believe is now termed the Battle of Artois. Strange to hear it referred to like that, even in my own voice— it is an ill-fitting name, almost heroic on the tongue, but then I don’t think that even a mind so great as dear Wilfred’s could come up with a name that did fit.

What? No, I didn’t know Wilfred Owen personally, though I often feel as though I did. I’m not as intimately familiar with his history as I am with his writing, so it’s entirely possible that we fought at some of the same battles— even that we saw one another, though at the time I obviously wouldn’t have recognized him. What’s that line from Longfellow? “Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing.” Rather.

I apologize, I’m a bit off topic. Feel free to omit this section of the recording, if you like, it’s just— Wilfred had a way of speaking of the war that I’ve never heard anyone else quite match in visceral accuracy. There is a kind of knowing in it that I’ve come to believe can only be obtained by the experience of what it was. There’s been much written about the war since his time, but nothing that really… _captures_ is the wrong word, you can’t capture a thing like that. Expresses, maybe. I remember the first time I read his poetry I had the odd thought that it sounded as though the war itself were speaking, with Wilfred as its mouthpiece, or perhaps its translator.

I’m rambling. This isn’t what you asked me in here for. I should describe the battle to you, such as I am able. I say that because, in the vein of the above, I have more often than not found myself lacking the words to express the things I experienced in those two years. In my former years I fancied myself a poet, but now…

But I will try my best. I can start, at least, by setting the scene. It was early May, a lovely time of year in the north of France; the winter had been harsh but short, and as we marched through the countryside we were all awed by the beauty of our surroundings. Being from New England, I was not at all used to the sort of gentle blooming that constitutes late spring in much of Europe; I associated the season with mud and slush and fervid, feverish warmth. I vividly recall the sight of the trees that dotted the field that would become the scene of such carnage positively bursting into flower. Even when we had dug ourselves into the trenches, and all the misery that comes from life within them, there was the not insignificant consolation of the world outside.

I have forgotten— or blocked out, perhaps— the tactical details of the battle that I was privy to. I knew what I needed to know at the time, and nothing more; I have no interest in improving my knowledge now. And anyway, in the thick of the fray, there is no such thing as tactics, because there is no such thing as consciousness. You momentarily go mad with fear, and it is a mercy, for if you had to witness the savagery taking place before and within you as a thinking and feeling man, I am confident that something essential within you would be as surely murdered as the fellow soldier speared on the end of your bayonet.

I apologize for the grisliness of my language, but you must understand that I am only trying to convey to you a sliver of a fragment of a fraction of what it was truly like. I cannot show you the fullness of it, of course, nor would I want to. I would never wish such a thing on anyone. But— your aim, as I am told, is to know as much as you can about this particular moment, and so I will try and provide you with that knowledge at as little cost to your sanity as possible.

And I do mean sanity. I am not unlearned in the occult (as you may have come to suspect granted the discrepancy between my appearance, my true age, and the story I am telling you) and in my time studying those strange arts I have been privy to a great number of secrets one might consider maddening. You are an institute devoted to the study of the paranormal, so you will know the gravity of what I am saying when I tell you that there is nothing in Prinn or Chambers or even Al-Hazred that so much as holds a candle to what it was like to fight in the Great War.

The battle waged on for what felt like years, but in fact were only days— about two weeks, all told. I remember very little of the specifics; all of it blurs together in a haze of mud and blood and screams and gore, violent and unceasing death on every side, and fear that filled me with such icy coldness that I thought I would freeze solid on the spot. Such utter and infinite horror, and all of it enacted on that pastoral field, beneath a beautiful spring sky, around trees so delicate and fragrant I sometimes thought I was hallucinating them. I wonder if all the blood in the soil changed the color of those lovely white flowers.

Eventually it was over, though I felt as though I had lived a thousand lifetimes before that day came. When my commander told the regiment that the Germans had surrendered, or that we had, or that the random and reignless turning of the war had rendered us a stalemate, I felt as though I might die with relief. Temporary as it was.

The dead were everywhere. That’s what I mostly remember, about the days after the battle— the sheer plenitude of bodies, and the weak-kneed gratefulness that I was not among them, that I had escaped with nothing but a bullet wound to the upper arm and a bayonet scar that cut from the corner of my mouth to my ear and always made me look as though I were half-smiling in polite concern. [Gestures to upper lip, though no such wound is visible.] They filled the abandoned trenches and the open field of no-man’s-land, of course, but also the places in which we living made our salvaged lives— makeshift field hospitals, filthy messes, even the pitiful “rooms” where we slept. It was like living in a cemetery, but instead of clean graven headstones the markers of the dead were their bodies, slowly beginning to stink in the spring air. I remember— thinking of that line in Eliot, in _The_ _Waste Land_ , where he quotes Dante. “So many, I had not thought that death had undone so many.” But for months and months there was no burial of the dead, none at all.

It was not as bad as the battle itself, this living amongst the dead, but because we were fully conscious and thinking while going about our days it was much more— impactful, I suppose. Before I had always thought of the deceased as relics to be treated with respect, but seeing them lying where they died and dying where they lay, bloated and pale and so unnameably numerous, drove home to me the unimaginable insignificance of us, all of us, you and I and Wilfred and every other human being that is or was or ever shall be. (Isn’t that the phrase? I was raised Episcopalian, but that was so very long ago.) We are such ephemeral creatures, meat and spark, flickers in a howling void. Or, at least, it is hard not to conclude such things.

It must be strange for you, hearing sentiments so bitter from the lips of a young man. By now, though, you ought to have realized that I am not fully what I seem to be, and the face I wear is not wholly my own. “Life is very long,” to pull from dear Thomas again, and mine more than most. I have known so much, and seen so much, and yet— nothing I have seen or known has touched those days among the dead, those hours underneath the spring sky, looking into the faces of men I knew that know me no longer.

I met a god once, many years ago. Not one of the petty gods, mind you, but— whatever it is that is the proper term for the ones above them. (Perhaps it’s misleading to call them gods— they’re more like forces of nature, as fundamental and ineffable as gravity. The Norse have a term for their type: “they who sit beyond the shadow.”) In my youth I was an adventurer in more lands than our world knows, and I was…reckless. Foolhardy, and often too skilled in the ways of dreaming for my own good. I got it into my head to challenge a divine mandate that had been set down before me, and spent months and months questing after a desire I had only the vaguest idea of. Eventually my seeking led me to a mountain a thousand times greater than any on this planet, atop which I met— well. I probably shouldn’t say his name out loud.

He tried to kill me, of course, because he was— is— cruel. Though that word, too, is misleading; would you call a human cruel for crushing a particularly noisome fly between his fingers? I can hardly blame him, really. Before that, though, he strode up to me and took my face in his hands and kissed me, which I found absurd at the time and still do now. What could possibly motivate such a being to focus his attention on me? I didn’t know. Still don’t, and I’m not sure I want to be given the answer.

But that isn’t the point. The point is that during the time I spent in his presence, with what must have been an infinitesimal sliver of his full attention focused on me, I felt as though I were— there’s no simile I could use to describe it. The closest I can come is that it was what an ant must feel, caught in a concentrated sunbeam reflected by a magnifying glass, at the moment just before it burns up. The term “under the microscope” is a pale shadow of what it was like, but it conveys the general sense. I couldn’t think or speak or move; I’ve been hypnotized before, and this was a thousand times more intense. I thought— to the extent that I could— that I was going to die, right there; I thought I would turn to ash in an instant, like Semele at the sight of Zeus. To this day I believe that if I had spent one more instant in his presence I would have been vaporized. His nearly killing me was a mercy.

That was how the war felt. That sense of ultimate, final, finitive insignificance in the face of something for which you have no name, something for which there _is_ no name. The god I saw, the god who kissed me, he was the war made a brilliant mockery of flesh, and behind his golden eyes I saw the carnage I knew so well writ large across the whole of the cosmos. It is what this universe is made of. It is all that there is, and was, and ever shall be.

I nearly died a year and a half later, at Belloy-en-terre during the Battle of the Somme. A shell hit the ground directly behind me and flung me into the air as if I were a doll, scarring my back with shrapnel and nearly snapping my spine. As I lay there on my stomach in the mud of no-man’s-land, ears ringing and mind woozy, I could have sworn I felt a familiar hand on the nape of my neck.

After that I was too badly shell-shocked to fight. Once my wounds had been seen to, they sent me back stateside, and I finished recuperating in Boston— my cousin Ernest had graciously (for once) taken over the maintenance of my house in Beacon Hill during my absence, and I was welcomed back warmly by those of my friends who had not also gone off to war, willingly or not. And life went on, as it has a tendency to do in the world of the living. My life, strange and wondrous as it has been, continued on its course.

I dream often. Mostly of the war, sometimes of the god, frequently of both. I wonder how much of those latter dreams are my doing, and how much are his— I had a lover once who jokingly told me that I was “supernatural catnip,” and I’d thought it funny at the time. But I have a feeling I’m not being left entirely alone with my memories, such as they are.

**Author's Note:**

> both title and epigraph are taken from t.s. eliot— title from "the hollow men," ep. from the first movement of _the waste land_. all the quotes in the body of the fic come from the authors to whom carter attributes them. i'm not a student of the first world war in the military sense, and the description of the battle of artois is not necessarily historical fact.


End file.
